Nightmare

Imagination, the essential gift for anyone with magic in their blood, could turn against a witch if exhaustion fogged the brain so much that she utterly lost herself in the depths of sleep.

And this nightmare made sense. The monstrous shadows jibbering at the base of the lighthouse tower, failing to gain entrance through the main door, crept and glided along the curving wall to attack the secret door which was nearly indistinguishable from outside, could well have travelled from beyond the seascape horizon.

The muffled thuds and scrabble of claws blended with this awful scene so well that the witch did not rouse until the rising yowl of her familiar broke through and wakened her.

She lay, unmoving, extended her senses to make sure that her protective spell work had, indeed, not been breached, before she opened her eyes.

Another soft thud followed by claws scratching at the wooden door brought her fully awake. She stared at the bolt she did not remember securing last night.

Shadow had never liked being barred from her, as his muttered yammer attested.

“Sorry,” she apologised as she escaped the tangle of coverlets and hastened to unbar the door.

What had she been afraid of? That the shapeshifter who had lost his powers would invade her bed in the form of a wolf?

The big black cat gave her a green-eyed glare before stalking into the room.

She did not offer her familiar a caress as she did not want to be scratched. Though he knew better, Shadow was not averse to drawing blood when he was in this much of a temper.

He gave vent to another full-throated yowl that, though she trusted him more than she had ever relied on anyone else in her life, made the hairs at the back of her neck rise.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

His stare of displeasure seemed to counter question whether anything could possibly be right.

“No,” she said, pushing away the worry as she pulled on her robe.

On the tight stairwell, she started to climb the stairs. Had the fever returned?

Shadow scolded her with discordant meows.

She turned around and saw that he was hastening downstairs.

“No,” she said again, as if the simple word could avert whatever catastrophe was happening.

Following her familiar down to the bottom of the stairwell, she was relieved to see that the main door was closed, not hanging open to let storm or invasion enter.

Annoyance rose in her when she saw the bolt was up. Maybe she should have told her uninvited guest about the secret door which could be secured from outside if you knew how.

She grabbed a heavy cloak and went out, followed by a muttering Shadow. Gusts of rain laden wind drove the last shreds of nightmare away.

“Where?” she asked her familiar, having no innate sense of the shapeshifter’s location. She barely knew him, given that he succumbed to that awful fever the day after his arrival and, since his powers disappeared, had rarely spoken due to being sunk in hopeless despair.

Shadow started running, so she followed the black cat into the tempest.

Her breath caught when she saw the shapeshifter standing at the top of the one elevation the rocky island offered. Stark naked despite the gale, his arms were spread wide, moving exactly the way the wings of a gull would in flight.

“Are you crazy?” she muttered before she realised that he might well be. Or sleepwalking? Perhaps he thought he could fly.

As she climbed, Shadow alongside her, she wished the shapeshifter had trusted her with his name, that would be useful right now.

Without that. . .

She paused near the top, studying how close he was to the edge of the cliff.

Confronting him physically might result in both of them falling. Not good when neither of them had a hope of flying.

“Will you help?” she asked her familiar.

Shadow’s tail was lashing but she felt his assent and sighed with relief.

“Get him to turn around. He thinks he is a bird, so you need to keep him from jumping off the cliff.”

She wove the enchantment with both hands, making a glittering ball that she tossed toward the big black cat whose form stretched and expanded until a panther paced toward the shapeshifter.

The guttural snarl wrought by the magic sounded worse than his usual repertoire even to her ears.

The shapeshifter startled and veered away from what must seem to him an enormous shadowy beast. Arms beating as though they were seagull wings, he ran downslope to get momentum and launched himself into the air but crashed back to earth.

In panic and confusion, he scrambled up. The panther herded him like a dog might pester a sheep, here, there, and everywhere, a growling menace, down toward the lighthouse.

The witch sighed, pulled her cloak tighter around herself, and followed them.

As the shapeshifter was reluctant to enter the door when she opened it, she pushed him, feeling how cold and wet his shoulder blades were. How long had he been outside? If only she could speak his name to help bring him back to himself.

But could she trust him? The gift of a name almost always required an exchange of the same confidence.

As she tried to towel him dry, he ducked his head, trying to peck her, flapped his arms and jinked about, evading her.

Impatience, after all the days and nights of caring for him and worrying about him, flashed up through her usual boundary of caution.

Dropping the towel on the floor, the witch twisted her fingers and raked both hands in a downward motion, gathered up the substance of the simple spell and flung it at him, commanding, “Be still.”

He froze, fear filling his eyes as he discovered he could not move. It could have been worse, though he was ignorant of that. She could have interfered with the natural impulse of his lungs to breathe or his heart to beat.

She towelled him dry, finished by rubbing the towel vigorously over his wet hair.

At least he was safe to leave in this state. She ran upstairs to the guest room to fetch the robe of the former lightkeeper. Back downstairs, as she dropped this over his head, she felt hesitant about releasing him from the spell.

First, she returned to the main door and bolted it securely, sketching a symbol that would prevent anyone else from touching the mechanism.

Shadow, having dwindled to his normal size again, looked up from grooming and meowed once as though approving of her caution. His green eyes held her gaze before rearranging his limbs and continuing to lick the rain from his fur and probably also ridding himself of the magical discharge caused by wearing the panther shape.

Her symbiotic relationship to her familiar, so deeply interwoven, replenished her stamina to handle the aftermath of another crisis with more patience than she could otherwise have mustered.

She stood in front of the shapeshifter and caught his attention with a raised finger near his face. “Listen,” she told him, “you are a mortal, not any type of bird or beast. I understand that you are not comfortable in your own skin, but that is the only guise you are able to wear for the time being. Get used to it.” She curled her hands into fists, then opened them abruptly to release the spell.

***

The crackle of dispersed magic filled his ears and made him blink rapidly but then he steadied, reaching inward for the awareness of breath and heartbeat, the pulse of life that somehow continued despite his circumstances.

Mortal but still himself. Doubt raged, but he refused to focus on what would only drag him into another downward spiral.

Instead, he studied the rain that glistened in the witch’s hair as she turned away from him, the seemingly impossible posture of the big black cat which was licking itself.

A stare from those green eyes evoked the monstrous panther, the swirling storm, the shadowy menace looming and his inability to escape into winged flight despite his surety that he could easily fly. With a deliberate effort of will, he concentrated on his current size in comparison to the feline, the shelter and warmth of the room and achieved some sort of equilibrium.

Widening his vision to include the witch as well, he said with a hoarse voice, “You saved my life again.”

She shrugged. “Getting to be a habit,” she replied, bending to sweep Shadow into her arms before taking a seat in a large comfortable chair.

“I owe you twice over,” he told her, though part of him wished she had not bothered.

“Call us quits,” she said, not looking at him, “if you tell me your name.”

He watched her petting the black cat, listened to the purring this evoked, envied their bond. Since the death of his brother, he always felt more keenly how much he was always on the outside looking in, excluded from any closeness or reciprocity, not shunned exactly but certainly not welcomed.

Why else, among all the magical bloodlines, were shapeshifters required to wear black which marked them out, always, as what they were and what they could potentially become? Useful, of course, when necessary, but always with that wariness from others as if he might without warning turn into a ravening wolf and rend them with tooth and claw.

His lips twisted into a grimace, so very tempted to merely tell her the sobriquet by which he would be known now, the brother of his brother whose own name, after death, no longer held any power or influence unless the old tales about spirits held any truth which he felt convinced they did not. He was no longer the second grandson of his grandmother.

But the witch had nursed him back to health during the days and nights of his fever and then rescued him from his own disordered mind in the storm with the help of her familiar. Shadow, no longer purring, stared at him from the comfort of the witch’s arms as though tracing the pattern of his thoughts. The witch continued to stroke the thick black fur which made him envious again of their closeness.

“Gwylan,” he told her, offering his name as if throwing a rope across a chasm from which a bridge could be woven, though he did not know how she would respond. Underneath the surface, the worry fretted him that he would never be able to shapeshift again and, if that was so, what did it matter that he revealed his true identity to her?

Only, the very last person he would have expected to share his name with, especially as they were merely chance acquaintances and nothing more, was a witch. He might as well have jumped off the highest point on the rocky island, believing that he was a seagull and could soar on the restless winds, only to crash on the upthrust rocks below and be smashed by the relentless waves.

Even if part of the stories was exaggeration, the core of the tales that a witch who knew your true name had power over you and could command you to do her will rather than your own made him feel he had just made the worst mistake of his life.

Maybe she had not heard him? He studied how absorbed she was in petting the big black cat, almost as if she dandled a baby on her lap, lost in her familiar the way that a mother might lose herself in the fascination of her own infant.

Just when he felt entirely convinced that he had spoken too softly for her to hear or even that she might have misheard the name, the witch raised her head and looked at him. Shadow, too, turned his green feline gaze so that all their eyes were focused on him.

“Gwylan,” the witch said, pronouncing the uncommon name with perfect ease, “you have not misplaced your trust.”

He swallowed, hearing his brother’s voice chiding him for being the worst idiot of a fool that had ever survived birth in the realm. How often had they used to talk about how important it was for a shapeshifter to not surrender his real name to anyone, not to the closest of friends, not to the most cherished of lovers, and certainly not to a witch who, apparently, was not going to grant him the privilege of knowing her name.

Mouth gone dry, he could find no words to answer her with, so he merely nodded once.